Not smiling any more...
A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Tue 19 Oct 2010 21:42
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40:08.87N
008:51.45W
Alex is still laughing. She often laughs, but never
usually this much, which means it's at my expense. Will, if you're reading this,
you're also partly to blame. Obviously, it's not my fault.
What happened is this. We'd had a lovely sail to
Figueira da Foz, arriving well before it got dark and even hoisting the
spinnaker for a couple of hours downwind sailing in the afternoon. We went out
for a bite to eat expecting to find a bustling town full of charming, local
establishments.
Instead, we found a hotel restaurant, bright with
neon light and with a couple of flat screen tellies blazing away with the
football, the same as everywhere in this country. We were contemplating the menu
when Will called to discuss our imminent Atlantic crossing. Alex was left to
order for us and made some seriously unaccountable choices on my
behalf.
Our aim had been to eat the first squid since
leaving Galicia, then tuck into some 'bacalau', which refers to
a broad spectrum of cod-based dishes. They were out of squid and,
while I was talking to Will, Alex inexplicably decided to order not one, but two
different versions of bacalau. Not really speaking Portuguese, she wasn't really
sure what either of them was.
The first, bacalau jsdgjlghfsdg, was salted cod
with finely chopped potatoes and egg - a sort of horrid fishy omelette. The
second smelt pretty dubious, but looked like cod fillet in a sea of oil, bobbing
with small dead mussels. It was definitely salted. Very salted.
The reason Alex finds this so hilarious is because
her family has always been suspcious of bacalau, forbidding their Portuguese
nanny from cooking any Portuguese food at all. But after a positive cod
experience at a fancy resto in Porto, I was convinced that I liked the stuff. In
essence, Alex is delighted to see reality reasserting itself, and hear me
muttering dark oaths about Portuguese cuisine.
In the end, though, the joke is on her, because the
acres of bacalau omelette left at the end of our meal are crammed in a foil
takeaway box in the fridge and will be her sole sustenance over the next couple
of days. The meal wasn't cheap, but Alex was complimented on the quality of her
Portuguese, begging the question: how much is a compliment worth? Sitting back
on board with a belly full of cod, I feel the price was too high...
I'm thinking of using my powers as skipper to
cancel all shore leave and confine her to the galley to peel potatoes endlessly.
She's still laughing now!
Tomorrow we have a leisurely start before pottering
south again to Nazare or Sao Martinho, as the mood takes us. From there, we're
just one long sail from Lisbon. We also met a new ARC boat full of young Swedes
who are following in the footsteps of last year's ARC boat, Cantare. They
apparentl bought her sat phone... which doesn't work. I'm sure we'll be seeing
more of them.
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